People are forever predicting the end of the world. In Christian circles this is generally connected with speculation around the promise Jesus made at his Ascension, namely, that he would be coming back, and soon, to bring history to its culmination and establish God’s eternal kingdom. There have been speculations about the end of the world ever since.
This was rampant among the first generation of Christians. They lived inside a matrix of intense expectation, fully believing that Jesus would return before many of them died. Indeed, in John’s Gospel, Jesus assured his followers that some of them would not taste death until they had seen the Kingdom of God. Initially this was interpreted to mean that some of them would not die before Jesus returned and the world ended.
